cafe hayek

Contemporary progressive ideology despises any rival authority or power, this is the source of its contrived grievance against either the Church or corporations, in fact any authority or power unalloyed from its totalitarian grasp.

The 2008 financial crisis was viewed by progressive ideologues as an opportunity to expand government. We've witnessed entire industries blithely transferred from potentially monopolistic corporations to actual monopolistic government agencies. As Hayek wrote decades ago, the crux of progressive ideology is that these agencies are run by supposedly disinterested public policy professionals who can allocate budget resources and levy costs without the distraction of profit motive. The source of this ethos was titled by Hayek as 'the pretense of knowledge'. According to Hayek, the source of this myth is unbridled power. Although historically developed by Prussian Bismark, it has its patrimony in all political coercion extending back to premodern regimes, it found a home in Woodrow Wilson's Presidency and the American Democratic Party.

Where's the threat?

Government monopoly operates without any of the ordinary competitive pressures of an "extended order" or market. It masks its authority in populist, paternalist appeals that are despotic. The entire oeuvre of Tocqueville is devoted to exposing how such gnostic impulses emerged from modernity and by extension in America.

Witness language used by progressive elites as they seek to rectify Marxist goals of social mobility through housing legislation. Throughout the housing crisis, federal and state regulators/administrators in collusion with progressive member of Congress responsible for allocating excessive credit to GSE (Government Sponsored Entities Fannie/Freddie), denounced traditional mortgage lending standards as being outdated this precipitated the slide to low-quality loans. This coincided with progressive litigation masking rent seeking from banks unwilling to meet those 'underserved'.

In 2005 & again in 2006 the Federal Reserve determined that the housing market was exceedingly overvalued, yet it chose not to intervene. The origins of a housing bubble, credit mania's are inseparable from the affinity between progressive-socialist goals and the politics of fiat/easy money.

The solution? A return to natural right doctrine by dismantling the failed ideological pretensions that ground positivism and its intellectual progeny, progressive ideology.